js6i's comments

> Do you thing religious followers, such as Matthew, see god/heaven/etc as being merely a metaphor?

No, I'm not suggesting that. The alternatives to just reporting facts are more than "merely a metaphor".

> works of fiction doesn't purport to either. They might have morals, or subtexts

Disagree - I think they distill patterns from the factual and present them in the form of stories, encoded in the structure of the story. If you're a materialist you might say that the story is less true than the factual manifestations of the patterns, I'd say it's more true; and that it's telling something about the world.

> What's the greater message

We're debating if zero even exists, don't ask me about analysis ;)

I think the disconnect is that you seem to consider religious texts as a dry statements of fact. That doesn't make any sense, they're clearly not that.

Would you say the same about great works of fiction, or old fairy tales that for some reason keep grabbing our attention and we repeat them for generations? That they're just falsehoods because duh, frogs obviously can't talk? Or can they have some deeper meaning? Stating facts is not the only way to describe the world.

It seems to me that your stand is analogous to anarchists' about law and government. Sure, there's a tyrannical aspect that can get out of hand, but it's far from the whole story.

It's interesting how people come and mock without having any framework of understanding the thing. It's almost like a lost language. Consider air - it is immaterial, the spirit/principle/reason/meaning/pattern of things. It's also the vehicle for speech, and when we stop breathing it we die. I don't think the quote (or the broader text) means a single concrete thing - it's saying something about how the world works, and should be applicable in multiple ways. Under appreciated rabbit hole!

That would be fair if OO/FP posts had always mentioned that the ideas were borne out of academia and don't necessarily easily apply in other domains, but that ship has sailed..

Huh? Coffee shops optimize for people not bumping into each other and having related items close together, and don't pretend to not know what kind of gear they have.. that's not a terrible analogy to the exact opposite argument.

Sure, many people do, and some don't. I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that decisions like that make one consider what are the assumptions and target audience of a project. In this case, as a potential user, if I'm looking for a language that's a deadly tool for doing difficult things, intentional limitations feel almost patronizing.

I'm wondering if the premise was that people compiling other people's code should be prioritized over "actual" users who develop their software using the compiler, who then would need to resort to external tools to do more complicated things, nullifying the protection anyway; or that it's expected that developers routinely include code they don't trust?

And doesn't processing necessitate buffers? How does this approach reduce the number of buffers involved? If anything, it sounds like less sharing would mean more buffers.

Never did any audio programming, I still can't make heads or tails out of it. Is it expected that an application sets up some processing graph for an engine to play a sound? [1] Instead of writing samples to a buffer in a loop? Who wants that?

[1] https://docs.pipewire.org/page_tutorial4.html

Maybe not the most formal of meanings, but my favorite is a probabilistic one: given a random element, how likely it is that it satisfies a predicate? If some elements don't, but it's still satisfied with probability 1, that's pretty clearly almost always.

EDIT: yeah you guys are right, I wouldn't worry too much about the prior not being a proper distribution, but still - this doesn't seem related to the cardinality of sets in a simple way after all!

> When we make statements such as the size of the set of all natural numbers 1, 2, 3... is the same as the size of the set of all natural even numbers 2, 4, 6..., despite the former containing the latter but not vice-versa... it seems the word "size" -- and associated terminology "larger than", "smaller than", etc. -- is a particularly unhelpful set of words to have chosen for this.

It seems to me, when you're counting things, you wouldn't care what are the things you're counting specifically; while in your example it does matter for determining the subset relation. Whatever way of counting where it matters would be kind of weird.

> it seems like an unwarranted leap to go from this formal comparison of cardinality of infinite sets, to the intuitive English-sentence idea that "almost all" real numbers are irrational

But the article uses "almost all" in the formal sense? Which, by the way, also has pretty intuitive meaning, in my opinion.

Is it just me? This website is super laggy on my PC (which can run modern games just fine). Hardly hits 50 fps when scrolling. How slow can one get and still claim to be fast?

That's a program that you can run on your machine to interoperate with your peripherals. If we have concerns about this being legal, our standards for ownership are way too low.

Cool! Maybe it's because it contains phase information which is not that relevant to hearing. FWIW I remember long time ago using it for image processing and the trick was to look at a sections of it, i.e. TC(p1, p2) where one of p1 or p2 was fixed.

I'm guessing that triple correlation could also be rendered into pretty pictures, did you try that?

Not knowing what you consider a hard problem, I think most of them are not of the kind that a language can do much about. It can easily be a drag though, for example by being too high-level and taking control away from the programmer when it's needed. I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad tool (lisp or GA). They are just tools, not magic, and tools don't solve hard problems.

It feels like lisp - neat, maybe has pedagogical value, does not really solve any hard problems and usually not worth the overhead. Yet I still want to like it.